INCIDENTAL ILLUMINATION by RONDER THOMAS YOUNG (Under the Direction of Judith Ortiz Cofer) ABSTRACT Incidental Illumination is a collection of fourteen short stories. The author introduces the collection with an apologia, which explores her process, material, and influences. INDEX WORDS: Short story collection, Thesis, English Department, Ronder Thomas Young, Master of Arts Degree, The University of Georgia INCIDENTAL ILLUMINATION by RONDER THOMAS YOUNG B.A., The University of South Carolina, 1977 A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ENGLISH ATHENS, GEORGIA 2003 © 2003 Ronder Thomas Young All Rights Reserved INCIDENTAL ILLUMINATION by RONDER THOMAS YOUNG Major Professor: Judith Ortiz Cofer Committee: Reginald McKnight Elizabeth Kraft Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2003 DEDICATION For Glenn, whose equilibrium, constancy and humor allow me to embrace my essential demons. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I thank Judith Ortiz Cofer, Reginald McKnight, and Elizabeth Kraft for their generosity, inspiration, and support. I particularly thank Professor Cofer for almost convincing me that with enough passion one can truly transcend the confines of time and space. I thank my friends Michelle, for her empathy, and Diana, for her patience. I thank my husband and three sons for understanding, and eventually appreciating, that I really do not care what they eat for dinner. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.................................................................................................v 1 Apologia: Annotation of Artifacts ....................................................................1 2 Picture Yourself...............................................................................................14 3 Aurora ..............................................................................................................21 4 Resurrection .....................................................................................................22 5 Incidental Illumination.....................................................................................26 6 Rhythm of the House .......................................................................................37 7 Side Street........................................................................................................38 8 Edge .................................................................................................................45 9 The Very End...................................................................................................51 10 Lucky Day.........................................................................................................55 11 Weather is Large..............................................................................................59 12 Exit 19-A..........................................................................................................71 13 Touch Me Here ................................................................................................88 14 The Bus to Heaven.........................................................................................105 15 Hannah Venus is Dead ……………………………………………………..118 vi Apologia: Annotation of Artifacts Process I empty, cull and reconfigure the right front quadrant of the garage and reduce the accumulated artifacts by half. I dump three loaded trunks and save only two ragged yellow pages ripped from an 8 ½ x 14 legal pad in 1976. My old rounder, slower letters fill the pages: Pursuit of the Past . comparative government teacher said, “Ronder is the most logical female student I have ever taught . my palm says I am very diplomatic . dream of the certainty of Greek heroines . of a release . insanity . going somewhere and not returning . Ain’t no man worth it. I remember the circumstances of the pages. I was a sophomore in English 428, Dr. Marin’s Modern American Literature class. The class was, I believe, divided into five thematic units, or pursuits, as Marin called them. I remember this particular pursuit, of the past, and another one, of the real. The others elude me. The plan was for us to personally pursue these concepts in a short essay, and then Marin would glean clues from our revelations about which writers we should read. He scrawled on the bottom of the page: Excellent, a really interesting account, developed in a striking and original manner. Read Mailer and Lewis (?). Also Pound. See me. I caught him in his office late in the afternoon. Pound, I asked him. Why? He opened up his hands. Shook his head. Glanced through the open door into the empty hallway. Seemed appropriate, he said. 1 2 I sit down on one of the empty trunks and read more slowly. I remember the people and places. High school, Hojo’s, Tom, Vietnam. I remember disregarding Marin’s choices, circumventing his Mailer, Lewis, Pound triad and settling instead into Nabokov. I remember hearing that high school teacher say the words Ronder is the most logical female student I have ever taught. What I do not remember is writing the words back then. This should not surprise me, because so many years have passed, but it does surprise me, because so many years did pass before I revisited and revised the phrase: You think like a man. Last line of the first paragraph and thematic center of a story called “Edge,” which I wrote almost twenty years later. The I can see your point, but . .my palm says I am very diplomatic in the essay I write for Marin becomes It was the ‘ yes, but’ state of mind that allowed me to live in the story. The youthful dream of a release, or insanity, and of finally going somewhere and not returning is reprised as over the edge . But not nearly enough in my forties. Still, as a nineteen year-old, I explore what characteristics of the young woman inspire the man’s observation. In “Edge” the exploration shifts to the revelation of the young woman’s response. She’s not sure what the words mean, but she automatically knows thinking like a man is the preferred method. She smiled into third period. Similar sentiments, separated by decades of memory and experience, expose a slightly different, tributary revelation in apposition. Later in the week, I take the pages along when I go to make copies of some other documents, and I inadvertently leave the brittle original behind in the machine. The larval remains of memory have flown off into fiction, and in my garage there are three empty trunks and a clear path from one door to the next. 3 For me, writing is a process of emptying, culling, and reconfiguring the persistent fragments, images and phrases that I carry in my cluttered consciousness and my sensual memory, that I pack and unpack in cardboard boxes delineated by system or decade: Childhood, Seventies Stuff, College, Saudi Arabia. I write not so much to communicate the import of these fragments, as to discover it. And, oddly, it’s after I’ve felt that I’ve captured the high essence of one of these personal artifacts that I feel as if I can release my grip on it. Like those brittle, yellow original pages left behind in the copy machine, primal remnants often fly off into fiction, leaving their larval husks behind. Others, like those documents and letters from the two years I lived in Saudi Arabia in the eighties, are particularly precious, because I’ve not yet been able to distill that experience into more than two consecutive lines. Incidental Illumination is a collection of short stories, in which both individually and cumulatively, past and present collide and oblique patterns emerge. The stories “Resurrection” and “Rhythm of the House” both feature the character Cassandra Hamilton. In “Rhythm of the House,” Cassie as a child sits on the bathroom floor in the middle of the night and listens to her drunken father and angry mother argue. In “Resurrection,” Cassandra, now in her early twenties, listens to her married lover’s hammering shower for a few minutes before slipping away without saying good-bye. It was not while I was writing the stories, but afterwards, when I was reading them, that I recognized the irony of the listening from, and later listening to, the bathroom, as Cassandra plans her escape from both situations. The stories were conceived separately, with no intention of reciprocal settings, so I was surprised and pleased to see the 4 connecting elements of narrative emerge. As I’m writing, that is what I’m looking for: the surprise. This emergent process also allows me to introduce characters while I still explore them, to use them as narrative devices without using them up. Danny Fontana, who is killed in the Vietnam War, is a primary obsession of the narrator in “Picture Yourself,” but he also makes cameo appearances in “Side Street” and “The Very End.” Quiet connections like these serve, I believe, to subtly and almost subliminally create a geographical and chronological nexus when the stories are read collectively rather than individually. At the same time, however, as a reader and a writer, I can observe how characters I find difficult to delineate comprehensively emerge from the observations of characters I know better. Hannah Venus in the short short story “Hannah Venus is Dead” is an example of another character whom I approach slowly and deliberately, whom I know will appear again and again, in stories in which she speaks for herself before, and perhaps even after, her death. Pamela